When crazy candidates attack

I just came across an incredible campaign anecdote while working on my dissertation. Check out this excerpt from a Washington Post story on the 1978 US Senate race in Maine:

Three independents are challenging Hathaway and Cohen, but only one of them, former state senator Hayes Gahagan, was expected to attract many votes.

The campaign of the 30-year-old conservative has foundered, however, since he announced that someone had implanted the word "sex" on his face in his campaign photographs.

He says he has since discovered the same word appears in Cohen and Hathaway campaign photographs and he makes no claim to know who is doing the implants. But he is calling for a congressional investigation of what he terms "a national scandal" of subliminal advertising.

His problem is that people outside his campaign, including this reporter, can't see the words even with the aid of a magnifying glass.

Just to reiterate, Gahagan wasn't some random loon; he was a former state senator who was a serious enough candidate that the Post reporter actually got out a magnifying glass to look for the word "sex." Wow.

Comments

[Hayes Gahagan]

Hello

Someone brought the article “When Crazy Candidates Attack” to my attention. This was certainly a blast from the distant past. The use of subliminal advertising was barely a topic of interest when I learned about it during the 1978 Senate Campaign. I also learned too late that it would have been better not to mention it at all. My thinking at the time was that it could have been a set-up whereby someone else could have discovered subliminals and accused me of using them in my campaign literature. As a “conservative” candidate I could have been perceived as being guilty of using Nixonian-type dirty tricks. As it turned out, it was a no-win situation. Being up-front about such a bizarre occurrence was unwise. There was a TV reporter in Southern Maine, John Donvan, who actually confirmed subliminal implants in the campaign literature but by then the damage had been done.

Best wishes

HG